Michael Jackson, R.I.P.

Talking to Rolling Stone at the end of 2001, Jay-Z put into perspective what it was like to rhyme over an official remix of Michael Jackson's "You Rock My World": "Mike was a superhero when I was a kid. Him wanting to work with me, period, was bananas!" Something about that line stuck with me. For people who grew up with Michael Jackson during a certain era, "superhero" seems right, for reasons good and bad.

So much of what Michael Jackson did in music doesn't seem like the work of a mere mortal. First, he broke through as a pop figure at a ridiculously young age. Child stars have been around forever, of course, but the best of those Jackson 5 records don't sound remotely like a gimmick. You believe every word of "I Want You Back", that this little guy has something profound to say about love, and he is saying it in the most energetic and life-affirming way you've ever heard. This is 1969, when he was just 11; a fifth grader, if he'd been a normal kid and gone to fifth grade. Which he wasn't, and so he didn't. His childhood was put on hold. But you listen to that music now and wonder how it was possible that a boy so young could be so thoroughly in command of his gifts.

Fast-forward 13 years: Motown's 25th anniversary special. The cheer that erupts from the audience when they see him do the moonwalk during "Billie Jean" is more like a gasp, a huge "Did you see that?" wail, like this guy had just leapt a tall building and no one was sure if they should believe their eyes. He was 24 then, Thriller had been out for four months. That night an icon was minted in an instant: the fedora, the sequined socks, that front leg-kick thing he did-- he flew in from another dimension and looked like the greatest dancer in pop music history. Superhero. He even dressed the part. Along the way, he broke the color barrier at MTV and changed the relationship between pop music and the moving image. He also began to do bizarre things no one understood that at first only added to his myth.

"Billie Jean" at "Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, and Forever" (1983)

But that's the thing about superheroes: they're also cartoons. That word, too, fit Jackson to a T. He was literally a cartoon from 1971 to 1973, when "The Jackson 5ive" was a Saturday morning TV show. And then, as time went on and he attempted his own version of what's usually called "growing up," he became one figuratively. It's hard to imagine a celebrity more isolated from the rest of the world's reality. Every "normal" thing he ever did-- a kiss, marriage, fatherhood-- seemed like a pose, a clumsy gesture from someone who never internalized the basics. He'd already been a "Tonight Show" punchline for years when Johnny Carson retired, and no one felt bad for poking fun at him even before the truly bad shit happened, because he never quite seemed real.

Eventually, the mocking came easier, because it seemed deserved: from all available evidence, he did things that everyone agrees are beyond the pale. It's easy to forget now that he was never actually convicted of molesting children. That first charge, in 1993, was dropped when the accuser's family took a payout worth $20 million. There was another check cut to a mother with a kid who she said had been victimized and then, in 2005, People v. Jackson wound up in an acquittal. Throughout, Jackson maintained his innocence. But no one's luck is that bad. And the fact that a grown man who suffered such public humiliation in 1993 would still be holding hands and sharing his bed with pubescent boys a decade later, and with cameras rolling, suggested that his judgment was so skewed, virtually anything was possible. Thinking about him, one tended to vacillate between pity and disgust.

His animated life grew increasingly dark and weird-- another marriage, kids named "Prince Michael" flung over balconies for the amusement of paparazzi and sent into public with masks, pathetic spending sprees, piles of lawsuits, bankruptcy-- until it became what from our remove seemed to be a horror show. And then it finally ended yesterday, June 25, 2009, when he died in Los Angeles.

He was only 50. However they've been raised and by whom, he's got children. He's also got a big family-- we know the names of many of them-- and surely they're devastated. Millions of people all over the world have been moved by his music, and a lot of them are suffering right now, missing a piece of their lives, even if it's only one filled with a iconic pop figure. So this is a sad time. But man, and I feel guilty saying this, there's also just the slightest bit of relief: that a life that had always seemed like a lonely, twisted nightmare filled with suffering had finally come to end. What were the chances of him finding perspective after all this time? And, after chasing Thriller's sales records for so long, making that his artistic and creative aim, what were the chances of him making music he was happy with again? How does a guy who wants to remain a kid forever, who started an endless course of plastic surgeries while still in his twenties, find a way to be a reasonably happy old man? When those comeback shows at O2 were announced earlier this year, I can't be the only one who felt a twinge of something in his gut, a sense that something horrible was going to go down. It was like seeing a friend who is a recovering addict walking into a bar. People were braced for a train wreck, but not for this.

Take away the music, and Michael Jackson's life is just too sad to contemplate. Which is a very good argument for not taking away the music, ever. We're all going to die someday, too. So let's live. You start with "I Want You Back" and "ABC" and "I'll Be There". You go through the Jacksons years with "Dancing Machine" and "Can You Feel It", and then a long stop at the incomparable Off the Wall. Jackson sang a small handful of tunes with a legitimate claim as the best pop song of the past 40 years, and "Don't Stop Till You Get Enough" is one of them. Then it's on to "Billie Jean" and "Beat It" and "Thriller" and "Wanna Be Startin' Something", and on through later hits: "Bad", "The Way You Make Me Feel", "Man in the Mirror", "Black or White", "Will You Be There", and sure, why not, "Gone Too Soon". Michael Jackson-- superhero, cartoon, singer, dancer, supremely troubled dude-- made all this music, and it's amazing.